A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.
One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops.
And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!
What’s going on?
It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.
The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.
And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. (Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)
And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.¹
Related: Shouting in the Datacenter.
Bonus chatter: Video version of this story and a Twitter poll.
Also, Larry Osterman had a similar experience with a specific game that crashed a prototype PC.
Follow-up: Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers, follow-up.
¹ Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to forestall the “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!” comments.
This kind of issues are still very much present in today's storage servers. I work for a company who specializes in Acoustic simulation and we help some customers to avoid having resonances create reading / writing problems in hard drives. The source of the noise / vibrations is often the cooling fan as companies are trying to compact more and more hard drives in the same volume, putting more constraint on the power for the fan to ensure thermal performances. You can read more here if interested, it's a short article explaining how Meta deals with this kind of issues:...
Dang it! I was gonna play it on my phone at work & shut the office down but it’s been resolved! 🤬😠😡
I guess they were lucky in the recording studio that none of their machines had such drives. That would be some support call: “Every time we try and record this song all our machines crash!” I can just imagine that support call to Microsoft.
Yes and a colleague once told me gullible had been removed from the dictionary.